#Where to watch cast away movie#

#Where to watch cast away movie#

He's one of those bland, pudgy, time-is-money guys, nice enough, but not anyone you'd want to spend most of a two-hour-and-15-minute movie with, let alone end up on a desert island with. Hanks' Chuck doesn't make much of an impression in the movie's first half-hour. The FedEx plane crashes en route, and he finds himself washed up on a remote island with little more than the clothes on his back - and one shoe missing at that. On Christmas Day he's forced to leave her to travel to the Far East on a last-minute assignment.

Chuck enjoys being on the go, but he's less happy about being away from his girlfriend, Kelly (Helen Hunt). Hanks' character is Chuck Noland, a FedEx systems engineer who travels the globe to various FedEx offices, dispensing nuggets of bizspeak like 'We live or die by the clock,' a line that's obviously a setup for the long stretches of solitary time that Chuck will soon have to endure. 'Cast Away' begins with so much formulaic portent that it took longer than usual for me to adjust to the movie I was watching rather than the one I expected to see. It comes off as potentially inspirational, possibly a little hokey, but infinitely well crafted and well acted. At its most predictable, 'Cast Away' is exactly the movie you'd expect the post-'Forrest Gump' Robert Zemeckis to make (and a movie far, far removed from the delectable nastiness of his 1980 'Used Cars' or his 1992 'Death Becomes Her'). 'Cast Away' is a mainstream feature, conventionally made, and it offers few real artistic surprises outside of Hanks' performance. It's mournful and troubling in a way that goes beyond ordinary movie manipulation. 'Cast Away' is a sad movie of the sort that Hollywood almost never makes: not three-hankie sad, not 'go have yourself a good cry' sad, but the kind of thing that, if you let it in deep enough, can send a shudder to your very soul. He works not in tides of feeling but in tide pools, and their stillness is devastating. Hanks has scaled everything back - every potentially overwrought expression or gesture, every bubble pocket of emotion that might normally be blown up large - to forge a gossamer-tough bond of intimacy with his audience that few actors have the skill or subtlety to achieve. But there's no way to foresee what Hanks, an astonishingly gifted performer who in recent years has taken nothing but big-ticket, overblown prestige roles, has done with this part. Anyone who has seen the trailer knows that Hanks' character survives his desert-island stint and comes back to civilization. 'Cast Away' is about triumph over adversity, but only in the roughest sense. Any sane person who has seen a movie in the past 10 years - or at any point in his or her life - would be justified in thinking it's probably an uplifting movie about triumph over adversity, the indomitable human spirit and other such nonsense.īut then, aside from the fact that we should all know better than to make judgments about movies based on trailers and ad campaigns, one of the great pleasures of moviegoing is being surprised. And how exactly do you market it? That may be why the trailers and pre-release hype for Robert Zemeckis' 'Cast Away' made it look so frightfully inspirational and, frankly, dismissable: Tom Hanks gets marooned on a small tropical island, the sole survivor of a plane crash. Melancholy will never be a trend in movies - it's not the sort of thing that packs theaters.